Today, companies investing in virtual worlds (e.g. Second Life, Active Worlds, etc.) by building and designing virtual objects such as houses, cars, computers and the like, obtain little data on how their investment is perceived and used by virtual world members. The lack of this data effectively prevents such companies from improving their virtual world design based on empiric data which results in the investment potentially being spent in the wrong places.
It is known in the art to mitigate this problem by implementing simple counters at specific places within the companies' virtual world space to at least track the amount of avatars visiting the company area, thus capturing information triggered by static sensors.
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